Background of the present disclosure is that in 2012, still 95 percent of all music downloads were made illegal. Thus the European Creative Industry will lose a turnover of about 240 billion euros due to this type of piracy till 2015. The losses due to free downloading of music, videos and films could cost the creative industry in Europe alone till 2015 about 1.2 million jobs. (Source: Study “Building a Digital Economy: The Importance of Saving Jobs in the EU's Creative Industries”, 2009, TERA Consultants).
The main problem is that piracy is very easy to carry out respectively it is too easy to get free music, videos and movies respectively to disseminate them. The financial damage for the music industry in 2009 caused by piracy (worldwide) amounts more than 4 billion euros estimated by the industry association.
However, in 2010 sales of downloaded music increased by 6 percent to 4.6 billion dollars (3.4 billion euros). Meanwhile, almost a third of all sales of the record companies comes from the digital business: The proportion grew in 2011 by 6 percentage points to 29 percent. It can be seen a very strong trend that sales will increase in this area in the upcoming years significantly. The share of digital revenues in the global music market in 2012 is 29%. In the U.S. the share is, however, already nearly 50%, while in Europe the proportion is still at 20% and therefore has an even greater potential for growth. In 2010, with an increase of 20% Europe had the largest growth in the digital market, and also has a more stable physical recorded music market.
Additionally, attention should be paid to a steady increase in mobile used end-user-devices. Until 2016, according to market research the expenditure on mobile marketing should increase by eight times. Hereby an enormous growth market, especially in the mobile sector, can be seen by inference. Another notable development takes place in the field of mobile operators that offer due to changing pricing structures simple and cheap tariffs en mass, especially with so-called download flat rates. Such downloads flat rates allow to receive large data packets via mobile device or tablet PC which caused even in the recent history of this technology area huge costs. Due to the more and more widespread storage of data in the internet or in the cloud, the data is often not locally stored on the devices of the users, but on servers and can be use over the Internet anywhere in the world, on any device (computer, tablet pc and mobile phone, especially smartphone), in particular using a password. Music, movies, photos and documents are not only stored in the cloud, but with special features of the cloud directly usable. For example, a playback function exists with which you can listen to music stored in the cloud via a player of the app. This is firstly advantageous because the data stored in the cloud can be rendered by means of a player of the app and a direct access to this data will not be possible, so that the illegal distribution is restricted. On the other hand, this is a disadvantage, since a permanent transfer of data from the cloud to the end-user-device must be performed, thus to maintain the data connection a high energy requirement is needed, which has in particular an extremely negative impact on the maximum operating time of mobile devices.